Around the middle of November (say 11/14 or 11/17) I'm going to be doing a death penalty discussion class. As part of the class, students will be posting messages on the death penalty forum of my site: http://www.eslgo.com/forum/deathp/index.cgi

If anyone else is planning to do the same topic, we could have our students talking back and forth on the message board, which would be fantastic. My students are college freshmen in Puchon Korea. Anyone interested?

Korea is a wired country. Every college student has internet access and can use the web pretty easily. I did have one student who was afraid to post because people might see his mistakes, but generally students have no problem using my site. And yes, I do spend hours on it.

You'll need the song "Iron Lady" by Phil Ochs to use it, but I've found it worthwhile for sparking discussion on the death penalty. If you get the version on "What's that I hear now? the songs of Phil Ochs" it's really good music too. The original version is so so.

Looks like good music, thoughtful and all that....maybe I'll get a copy.

What a well-thought out lesson plan!

You know, it really depends on what time of the day it is, and on what happened before the lesson, and on what's going to happen after, and on the temperature, and on the weather.... on some days, lesson plans don't work at all for me, because their involvement is zero, and I feel "what a shame about the work I've put in" and end up doing teacher-directed, uncommunicative translation exercises interspersed with a lot of *beep* about their failure to study vocabulary, and then, miraculously, they end up enjoying these structured kind of lessons.

I find that my students appreciate some structure too. They like knowing exactly what I want them to do. The best communicative activities involve some planning time or you may find learners at a loss for words. Perhaps your learners need more planning time than they get?

Most, however, prefer to do things spontaneously, and have made it a habit to say anything that's on their mind without worrying too much about whether it's correct or not - maybe this is also a consequence of me being not really harsh on them when they make mistakes. They've internalized the "as long as you get the message across, everything else is of secondary importance"- message allright, maybe more than I'd have liked them to.

If they had extra time on their hands, they'd use it to key messages into their cell-phones, to distort images on their laptop or to run finger-skateboards up and down their desks. Sitting down and working conscientiously seems to be culturally alien to them - the only way I can get them to do it is to be ultra-structured in my approach, and being brutally frank about the consequences.

Anything *too* communicative smacks of game-playing to them, and brings on a fun-and-games attitude in a jiffy. I mean they *love* school, and it's kind of exhilerating to co-operate with people bristling with life and full of joi-de-vivre, but sometimes I think work is not progressing at quite the rate I would like to see it progress.

But that's probably less of a problem where you are at, isn't it? From the responses on the death-penality message-board they seem quite a serious bunch.....